1. The Running Man (1987)
Nobody paid to see Arnold Schwarzenegger movies in the '80s for satire, much less satire poking fun at the public's bloodlust for media violence. But The Running Man, based on the novel by Stephen King, did have a fairly subversive message about the gory extremes our culture goes to for entertainment. Thankfully, this message was tucked inside the warm, cozy confines of gory entertainment. After all, surely the real-life viewers who are enjoying watching game-show contestants kill each other for sport are above the fictional viewers who are enjoying watching game-show contestants kill each other for sport. The real-life ones are consciously critiquing the fictional ones' society, so they can revel in the messy killings with a clear conscience, and a self-applied pat on the back for their discernment.
2-4. Series 7: The Contenders (2001) / The Condemned (2007) / Death Race (2008)
Since The Running Man, action-gore has gotten slicker, but the films that let people watch action-gore while looking down on the slobbering-bastard audiences who want action-gore haven't gotten any less hypocritical. In the amateurish indie Series 7: The Contenders, a reality-TV show apes and mocks Survivor and its ilk by making contestants assassinate each other. It's Battle Royale with a particularly American twist, pointing out where all the vicious schadenfreude of reality shows is headed. The Condemned and Death Race (the latter a remake of the '70s film Death Race 2000) both follow similar tactics, but with bigger explosions, as criminals are forced to fight to the death, ostensibly for their freedom. Twist number one: They're in a corrupt system that isn't planning to let them go, no matter what happens. Twist number two: Both films mock and condemn the kind of people who would watch such entertainments, while working overtime to pander to those same people. The message at hand: "You and everyone in the movie theater with you are a bunch of jerks contributing to the downfall of society by making exactly this kind of morally bankrupt, inhuman 'entertainment' possible. Hey, wanna see another guy totally explode?"
5. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
The thrill of seeing The Blair Witch Project at the moment it first came out mostly came from the cleverly hyped-up possibility that it was an actual snuff film. It isn't, of course, but its effectiveness is based on how convincingly "real" it is for the audience. You have to believe these college kids are actually being haunted by terrible north-woods spirits—or suspend your disbelief, anyway—in order for this artless, occasionally dull film to "work" as a horror movie. While the concept behind The Blair Witch Project doesn't really hold up on repeat viewings, it did prove prescient for the just-blossoming Internet generation, where fantasy is fueled by stylized versions of supposedly unfiltered "reality" that anyone can enjoy privately and anonymously.
6-8. Fear Dot Com (2002) / Halloween: Resurrection (2002) / Untraceable (2008)
Similarly, a few horror films have addressed the freedom and anonymity of the Internet by implying that it's used to give real murderers an audience with an unslakeable thirst for ever-gorier thrills. Guess what? That audience is you, the horror-movie viewer. And it's your fault that people are being put into death traps in Untraceable (the more people tune in to the killer's website, the faster the victim dies), or that hot, stupid teenagers are locking themselves and a bunch of webcams into Michael Myers' family home to create an online sensation. If there wasn't an audience for these killer websites, the movies explain, they wouldn't exist. Similarly, if you didn't keep buying tickets for these movies, they wouldn't exist. But you'll get yours: In Fear Dot Com, the people who log into the titular live-torture-porn site soon die horribly themselves.
9. Funny Games (1997)
A handful of filmmakers have openly, rather than hypocritically, dared their viewers to face up to their own involvement in the ugliness taking place onscreen, but none of them have been as obvious—or as ruthlessly effective about it—as Michael Haneke. His utterly remorseless film about a home invasion by a pair of young psychopaths (and its 2007 doppelgänger, Haneke's scene-for-scene English-language remake of his German-language original) is no more grotesque than many similar thrillers; in fact, with its relatively small body count and its reluctance to show gore or onscreen bloodshed, it seems almost gentle. But the emotional brutality of what's happening kick-starts Haneke's bulletproof film-as-threat: He dares viewers to walk out rather than tolerate a scenario in which there is no hope of redemption or justice. If they leave, he wins; if they stay, he wins. There is no crueler moment in contemporary cinema than the moment when Paul, the more articulate of the two killers—and the one who asks the viewers if they're on the victims' side—literally rewrites the movie's ending rather than leaving the audience with a single thread of relief.
10. The Conversation (1974)
In films where the protagonist as well as the viewer is a voyeur, the stars must often become active participants in what they're watching, in order to save a life or prevent something horrible from happening. In Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, paranoid surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is hired by a jealous husband to spy on his young wife and her lover. When Caul tapes a conversation implying that the couple is in danger, he feels compelled to act. But who's really in danger here? Be careful, peepers. In The Conversation, being a voyeur doesn't mean being an all-knowing, omniscient observer. Sometimes what you see (or hear) isn't what you get.
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